PTR Back to Test Build
Another PTR build was pushed recently with no significant changes. This time it was a Test build, while the previous build was a Release Candidate. There is still plenty of time for the patch to go live by the Season 10 end date of November 29.

Statistics: Achievements and Honor Kills
All of the graphs today allow zooming in both the X and Y direction to allow you to take a closer look at areas of interest. As the US and EU sample sizes were not the same (~3.6 million vs ~2.7 million), the EU results were scaled up to the US sample size, allowing us to directly compare the results.

The first graph we are looking at today shows you how many characters have an achievement point total in the indicated range of achievement points. For example, the point of 1500 has 103,525 characters for the US. This means that out of the entire sample of the US, 103,525 characters have between 1500 and 1599 achievement points. This type of counting of characters also applies to the other two graphs.

You can see that US players seem to have more alts or casual players than the EU, but both experience that nice dip right before 9000 achievement points. This is due to the people that are close to It's Over Nine Thousand! achievement pushing to finish it. Both the US and EU have two main peaks, likely indicating the population of 85s that has run no dungeons and the part that has run some of the dungeons. This indicates that the majority of the sample does not play enough to get a large amount of achievements on all of their characters.

Moving on, the second graph has Honor Kills split up by faction, as there was no significant difference between the US and EU. It does appear that at the more casual end of the graph the Horde has a slightly higher amount, but once you get closer to the second half of the graph that gap shrinks to almost nothing. Only part of the range is shown, you can see the entire range is hard to look at. The entire range does show you that the gap of Alliance players is compensated for by the increase at the very low HK level. This indicates that the amount of casual players or alts that are PvPing is significantly higher than the people that play often.

The final graph breaks down the HKs by realm type, and you can see the players that have less HKs play on the PvE realms, while the players with more play on the PvP realms. Ths gap disappears once you go farther down the graph to the more serious players. The RP realms results look very similar to PvE realms and RPPvP realms look very similar to PvP realms. All of the factions and realms showed a nice bump around 100k HKs when people were going for the 100000 Honorable Kills achievement.

If you like this type of post or want to see something specific let me know in the comments!

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Account Security Warning: Steam Compromise

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

As some of you may know, Valve Software recently announced that certain Steam user account information was compromised by an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into their network. The statement from Valve on these events can be found here:

If you’re a registered account holder with Steam, we encourage you to review the information provided by Valve as soon as possible. We also recommend that you update your Battle.net password via Account Management (https://us.battle.net/account/management) should it be the same as or similar to the one you used for Steam or for the Steam forums. You may also wish to change your registered email address as a further security measure, or to change the password to your email account and other online accounts that might be at risk of compromise. If you are unable to update your Battle.net email address and/or password on your own, please contact our customer support staff for assistance: http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml

Annual Pass with Parental ControlsBlizzard is sending out an email to people that have purchased the Annual Pass in Europe with Parental Controls enabled to confirm that the parent approves of the free copy of Diablo III due to its rating. If you purchased the Annual Pass and have Parental Controls enabled, you have until November 28 to reply to the email.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Dear parent or guardian,

We are writing to you to let you know that the owner of a Battle.net account for which you have registered as the parent or guardian has signed up for the World of Warcraft Annual Pass promotion. This promotion offers a free digital copy of our forthcoming game Diablo III when players commit to a 12-month subscription for World of Warcraft.

However, as Diablo III has been rated as PEGI-16 (USK-16 in Germany), we are writing to you to let you know that this promotion will automatically be removed from the account on November 28, 2011. Once the promotion is removed from the account, the account holder will once again be able to modify their existing World of Warcraft subscription, including removing recurring payments.

If you instead wish to continue with this promotion and secure a free copy of Diablo III for the account holder when it is launched, please reply to this email before November 28, 2011 stating that you, as the parent or guardian, are happy to continue.

If you have any questions or further requirements, telephone numbers and further help from our Customer Support department can be found at http://eu.blizzard.com/support/.

Poll: Annual Pass
While we are talking about the Annual Pass, let us know if you decided to purchase it!

No offense, but the question is somewhat poorly written. It really asks TWO questions: "Are you buying and annual pass" and, if so "Are you buying it to get a free copy of Diablo III." In essence, if you are buying an annual pass, but not to get Diablo III, you would answer "No." However, if you simply are not buying an annual pass, the answer still would be "no". Not going to get very reliable data as written. However, you do have a bright future as a poll writer for political media.

I didn't think the question was that hard.

Did you purchase the Annual Pass?

No, I purchased Diablo 3 for free (this part of the Annual Pass so that would be a yes)
No, I purchased for the free Beta (that would be part of the Annual Pass so again that is a yes)

The honor kill graph is so wrong. I know quite a few people just on my server with over 100k honor kills.. yet the graph is showing only 200ish in the whole world?I myself have over 165k. That can't be right.

The honor kill graph is so wrong. I know quite a few people just on my server with over 100k honor kills.. yet the graph is showing only 200ish in the whole world?I myself have over 165k. That can't be right.

First, the graphs are based on information provided by the Armory API. It won't take into account inactive characters. Secondly, were you hovering over just one faction?

I agree; the question is poorly worded, but as far as I can tell no one has said the right reason. None of this nonsense about why you got it; "Did you purchase the Annual Pass?" doesn't even hint at the slightest suggestion of implying that maybe it has even a passing interest in the why, it literally just asks about the what. If you got it for D3, you got it. If you got it for the mount, you got it. If you got it for the beta, you got it. If you got it because all your friends were getting it, you got it. If you got it because you weren't paying attention and were just randomly clicking on the screen, you got it.

The honor kill graph is so wrong. I know quite a few people just on my server with over 100k honor kills.. yet the graph is showing only 200ish in the whole world?I myself have over 165k. That can't be right.

It says at the start of the section it's just a sample of each region.

The honor kill graph is so wrong. I know quite a few people just on my server with over 100k honor kills.. yet the graph is showing only 200ish in the whole world?I myself have over 165k. That can't be right.

The sample clearly did not catch every player in the US or EU. There are 32,885 characters in the sample that have over 100k HKs. I just happened to pick RP vs RPPvP for that graph demonstrating the 100k bump.

Well this is pretty silly. I enabled parental controls back in the day to opt out of RealID, and I now had to send Blizzard an email that I am indeed allowing myself to play Diablo III.Lol.

had to do it, too, because i like the gametime-report ;-)
but i mean, it wasn't that time robbing to write a short reply to that email. the more time consuming part was figuring out, that it wasn't a scam.

Haha, I love that little bump on the achievement point graph where people just want to get over 9k and then stop. It looks like there's a slight bump over the 10k one too, but the 9k bump really sticks out, amazing!